Prometheus, the industrial-focused AI venture led by Jeff Bezos, has raised $12 billion in a Series B funding that values the company at $41 billion.

The financing marks one of the largest recent private rounds and signals investor appetite for AI aimed at redesigning how complex hardware gets developed.

The company plans to apply AI to earlier stages of manufacturing work, including prototyping and the tuning of equipment and workflows before full-scale production, Axios reported. Prometheus is being run with Vik Bajaj, a former Google executive, and has about 150 employees.

Bezos told Axios the long lead times for building physical products are a core target for the startup. "The cycle from dream, to manufacturing at rate, to having it out in the world can be very long," he said.

In a longer example, Bezos described how even incremental changes to a jet engine can stretch into a decade-long effort and said Prometheus is building tools to shorten that timeline. "So what we're doing is building a set of tools that will empower engineers to compress that cycle time and make that dream-build loop be 10 times faster or even more," Bezos said.

Prometheus Pre-Production Optimization

Prometheus is positioning its technology as engineering software rather than a factory-automation or robotics play. Bezos acknowledged the tools could still be used in designing robots or even factories, but the current focus is on pre-production optimization.

The startup says it is working toward what it calls an "artificial general engineer." Bajaj framed the pitch as expanding, not shrinking, the engineering workforce: "The pace of our physical creation right now is nowhere near the pace of human imagination," he said.

Bezos and Bajaj also said Prometheus is not connected corporately to Amazon or Blue Origin.

Bezos said of Prometheus, "it deserves a dedicated team that is obsessed with this one thing," while also calling Blue Origin a "case study for a customer of Prometheus."

Backers in the Series B include JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DST Global and Arch Venture Partners. Prometheus also disclosed that Bezos was the biggest contributor to its $6.2 billion Series A.

The company declined to address a reported plan to seek $100 billion for a related holding company that could purchase legacy industrial businesses and use their data to support Prometheus, Axios said.

It also did not provide details on how the system is trained or a timeline for an initial product release, beyond noting that there is no "internet of manufacturing data" available to ingest.